Abaluck Jason, Gruber Jonathan
Yale SOM and NBER, Yale School of Management -Economics, 227 Church Street Apt 10H New Haven, CT 06510.
MIT and NBER, MIT Department of Economics, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. E52-434, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Am Econ Rev. 2016 Aug;106(8):2145-2184. doi: 10.1257/aer.20130778.
We study choice over prescription insurance plans by the elderly using government administrative data to evaluate how these choices evolve over time. We find large "foregone savings" from not choosing the lowest cost plan that has grown over time. We develop a structural framework to decompose the changes in "foregone welfare" from inconsistent choices into choice set changes and choice function changes from a fixed choice set. We find that foregone welfare increases over time due primarily to changes in plan characteristics such as premiums and out-of-pocket costs; we estimate little learning at either the individual or cohort level.
我们利用政府行政数据研究老年人对处方药保险计划的选择，以评估这些选择如何随时间演变。我们发现，不选择成本最低的计划会带来大量“放弃的储蓄”，且这一情况随时间有所增加。我们构建了一个结构框架，将因选择不一致导致的“放弃的福利”变化分解为选择集变化和来自固定选择集的选择函数变化。我们发现，放弃的福利随时间增加主要是由于保费和自付费用等计划特征的变化；我们估计在个体或群体层面几乎没有学习效应。
